I often tell my clients that business is simple but people complicate it. A few basic things every leader can do will increase their effectiveness right away. If you practice discipline on the following items 10 items, I guarantee you will see rapidly improved business results:

You mission statement and core values should be easy to read and understandable and revisited in every leadership/management meeting before you get started. This information also should be posted in as many locations as possible.

Make sure your organization manages to a dashboard of 5-7 key performance indicators and that this information is made public and the topic of ongoing management discussions.

The organization should go through a strategic planning process every 3-5 years where you establish a strategic direction for the company with supporting goals and major action items.

Make sure you don’t make big decisions in an ad hoc or gut level fashion. Create and use a formal decision making filtering process aligned with the previous three points and stick to it.

Make sure each of your direct reports has a succinct position description with crystal clear responsibilities and definitions of success. Individual definitions of success should easily track back to your mission, values, goals and organization-wide key performance indicators.

Have regular 1-1 meetings with your direct reports where you discuss their individual progress in their position, obstacles to their continued success, balancing of shifting priorities, check-in on major action items, and discuss training/support needs. I highly encourage you to create a 1-1 culture throughout all levels of your company.

Have all of your direct reports meet together as a leadership team at least monthly where you discuss progress against key performance indicators and goals, balance organization-wide priorities, and coordinate performance efforts.

Make sure you have an HR approach that hires people carefully and screens individual employees for basic leadership/management competencies before you promote them into a supervisory position. Once the move is made, ensure there is ongoing training and support to maximize individual growth and development.

Create the infrastructure within your company to regularly solicit customer feedback, reward success, identify opportunities, and make adjustments based on this information.

Make sure every employee has at least some variable pay built into his or her compensation package. The higher an individual goes in your organization the more of their pay should fluctuate based on performance.

Leadership is not rocket science. Creating the conditions for business success is actually pretty basic:

Be clear about where you are going and why

Define what success looks like and track performance

Make sure all of your key people on the same page

Don’t “wing it” when it comes to important decisions

Ensure that every single employee knows how they fit in the big picture and what they are supposed to be doing

Create a process for providing on-going performance feedback

Hold people accountable for results

Be careful about who you hire and put in supervisory roles

Provide extensive training and support

Never stop communicating with your customers

Make sure everyone shares in the success of the business but also feels the pinch of nonperformance